Patel once called for ending FBI director's government jet use. Now he won't reveal if he's a frequent flyer.
The FBI should "ground Chris Wray's private jet that he pays for with taxpayer dollars to hop around the country," Patel
said
during his "Kash's Corner" podcast in 2023.
Now,
Patel
himself is the director, and questions have begun circulating inside the FBI about the degree to which Patel is using governmental airplanes for his personal travels.
The FBI declined to share Patel's flight schedule and would not confirm his presence on a number of flights to destinations where he later appeared. During the first weekend in April, for instance, a Boeing 757 owned by the Department of Justice made two round trip flights from Washington to New York.
On Saturday, April 5, the narrow-body jet took a 57-minute flight to Stewart International Airport, a short drive from West Point, where Patel made an appearance at a charity hockey event hosted by the FBI. The next day, the jet was back in the air to JFK Airport, landing just hours before Patel resurfaced in box seats next to hockey legend Wayne Gretzky and watched Capitals star
Alex Ovechkin break the NHL scoring record
.
The New York Times first
reported
on Patel's use of FBI aircraft on Sunday.
It's unclear if Patel was on these flights — and if he was, whether they were purely personal, work related, or both. But on Monday, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee told CBS News in a statement that he wants the answer to those questions.
"The Judiciary Committee must investigate Director Patel's apparent misuse of taxpayer dollars," said U.S. Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois. "The American people expect an FBI Director who focuses on the security and safety of the nation, not someone wrapped up in the trappings of the spotlight."
FBI directors are required by executive branch policy to use government aircraft for air travel, whether official or personal. That enables them to maintain access to secure communications wherever they travel. And it gives the director the ability to move quickly in an emergency.
If the travel is personal, the director must reimburse the government the cost of a commercial coach airfare. When traveling for personal reasons, the director may bring family or friends, but guest travel must be reimbursed to the government as well. Friends or family members are never allowed to fly on FBI aircraft unaccompanied by the director. It is unclear whether
Patel
has brought friends or family aboard government jets.
But Durbin said the use of the plane still has limits and questioned whether the use of the aircraft cut against the Trump administration's professed commitment to
rooting out
government waste.
Patel's use of Gulfstream jets operated by the FBI appears to extend to his frequent trips to Las Vegas, where he has a home, and to Nashville, where Patel's girlfriend, who is a country singer, lives. Sources familiar with Patel's travel confirmed to CBS News that the director was on the plane for several trips captured by FlightRadar24, including a weekend dash to Las Vegas on March 7 and a weekend in Nashville on March 14.
It is unclear if he was aboard on Feb. 24, when one of the FBI's Gulfstream 5 jets flew from Manassas, Virginia, where the plane is based, to Nashville, stayed on the ground for an hour and 27 minutes before returning to Manassas.
On some occasions, Patel may have traveled for both pleasure and business. An FBI jet flew on March 21 from Washington to Nashville. That day, Patel attended a roundtable meeting with state and local law enforcement officials in Tennessee, and also visited the FBI field office in Nashville. The plane returned to Washington later that afternoon. It is unclear whether he saw Alexis Wilkins, his girlfriend, while he was there.
In a statement to CBS News, the FBI said it "does not comment on travel arrangements for security purposes. All ethical guidelines are followed rigorously."
Some bureau veterans told CBS News they have been troubled by the frequent use of government aircraft by FBI executives, making the aircraft less available to support operations in line with the primary mission of investigating crimes, chasing spies and preventing terrorist attacks.
"Those aircraft have been procured or leased specifically to support operational needs," said Christopher O'Leary, a former senior counterterrorism official at the FBI who has used the planes dozens of times for sensitive missions and critical response. "The concern is that the routine use of them by the director and deputy director for personal travel could take a critical resource offline when they are sometimes needed at a moment's notice."
O'Leary and others said they also worry that the use of the planes sets the wrong tone.
"It's a bad leadership example," he told CBS News. "All agents are provided an FBI vehicle, and they cannot be used for personal use. They can only be used for going to and from work, for official duties or to respond to a crisis and that is strictly enforced."
In 2013, the Government Accountability Office probed the Justice Department's and the FBI's use of the FBI G5 jets for "non-mission purposes." The
report
that followed laid out how often and for what reasons the planes were used by the attorney general and the FBI director, the costs associated with the flights and the rules and regulations governing them. At the time, the GAO did not find any specific instances of wrongdoing, although it did emphasize the importance of officials being responsible stewards of taxpayer funds when using the planes.
Diana Maurer, a director at GAO and author of the 2013 report, told CBS News that the same principles that were at play when the congressional watchdog agency did its review remain relevant today.
"I don't know what the current FBI director did or didn't do, and we haven't updated our 2013 report," Mauer said in an interview. "But just because you're allowed to do something doesn't necessarily mean you should."
Maurer noted that government officials should not abuse their privileges at the expense of the taxpayer.
"Using government aircraft, as FBI Directors are required to do for security reasons, costs significantly more than commercial flights. I hope the FBI and the Department of Justice are considering the implications for taxpayers when the Director uses government aircraft for non-mission purposes."
During the years that
Wray
ran the FBI, his personal use of the jet became a touchstone for conservative critics. Wray occasionally flew from Washington to his hometown of Atlanta, where his family maintained its residence. He drew criticism from Republicans in Congress and some former FBI agents for summoning the G5s to Reagan National Airport from Manassas, a 15-minute flight, rather than being driven 30 miles to the Virginia airport where it maintains a hangar.
FBI whistleblower Steven Friend, a close ally of Patel's who was suspended by the bureau over concerns that his views on the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol affected his work, criticized Wray in more than a dozen social media posts for his use of the jets. "Chris Wray abuses his @FBI jet privileges because he doesn't like to sit in traffic," Friend wrote in a Dec. 14, 2023, tweet.
Wray was also raked over the coals by Republican lawmakers for cutting short a Senate oversight hearing in 2023 to fly on an FBI aircraft to a family vacation in the Adirondacks. (Wray at the time pointed out that he had negotiated the length of the hearing with committee staff.) The chairman of the committee, Sen. Chuck Grassley, later questioned Wray's use of the FBI jets and whether it amounted to an abuse of taxpayer money, a suggestion that Wray rejected, noting that he was a "required use traveler," and that he reimbursed the government in every instance he used the planes for personal purposes.
A spokesperson for Grassley said the senator is "still waiting on the FBI" for records regarding Wray's use of the jets and criticized Democrats and the media, claiming they never showed "any interest in scrutinizing FBI Directors' travel logs until Kash Patel came on the scene." Grassley's office did not respond to a question about whether the senator would continue his oversight of FBI directors' government jet travel while Patel is director.
FBI directors have also at times been sensitive about the potential misuses of the FBI's fleet. In at least one case, a former FBI director went to extraordinary lengths to save the taxpayer money for his air travel.
Soon after he
became FBI director
in 2013, James Comey traveled back and forth to Connecticut where his family was still living. At the time, Washington was in the midst of a heated budget battle with the possibility that government workers would be furloughed and have their paychecks withheld. So, according to two former law enforcement officials, Comey asked President Barack Obama for a special dispensation from the "required use" rule so that he could fly commercial at a much lower cost to the government.
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The Hill
2 hours ago
- The Hill
Bolivia heads to the polls as its right-wing opposition eyes first victory in decades
LA PAZ, Bolivia (AP) — Bolivians headed to the polls on Sunday to vote in presidential and congressional elections that could spell the end of the Andean nation's long-dominant leftist party and see a right-wing government elected for the first time in over two decades. The election on Sunday is one of the most consequential for Bolivia in recent times — and one of the most unpredictable. Even at this late stage, a remarkable 30% or so of voters remain undecided. Polls show the two leading right-wing candidates, multimillionaire business owner Samuel Doria Medina and former President Jorge Fernando 'Tuto' Quiroga, locked in a virtual dead heat. Many undecided voters But a right-wing victory isn't assured. Many longtime voters for the governing Movement Toward Socialism, or MAS, party, now shattered by infighting, live in rural areas and tend to be undercounted in polling. With the nation's worst economic crisis in four decades leaving Bolivians waiting for hours in fuel lines, struggling to find subsidized bread and squeezed by double-digit inflation, the opposition candidates are billing the race as a chance to alter the country's destiny. 'I have rarely, if ever, seen a situational tinderbox with as many sparks ready to ignite,' Daniel Lansberg-Rodriguez, founding partner of Aurora Macro Strategies, a New York-based advisory firm, writes in a memo. Breaking the MAS party's monopoly on political power, he adds, pushes 'the country into uncharted political waters amid rising polarization, severe economic fragility and a widening rural–urban divide.' Bolivia could follow rightward trend The outcome will determine whether Bolivia — a nation of about 12 million people with the largest lithium reserves on Earth and crucial deposits of rare earth minerals — follows a growing trend in Latin America, where right-wing leaders like Argentina's libertarian Javier Milei, Ecuador's strongman Daniel Noboa and El Salvador's conservative populist Nayib Bukele have surged in popularity. A right-wing government in Bolivia could trigger a major geopolitical realignment for a country now allied with Venezuela's socialist-inspired government and world powers such as China, Russia and Iran. Conservative candidates vow to restore US relations Doria Medina and Quiroga have praised the Trump administration and vowed to restore ties with the United States — ruptured in 2008 when charismatic, long-serving former President Evo Morales expelled the American ambassador. The right-wing front-runners also have expressed interest in doing business with Israel, which has no diplomatic relations with Bolivia, and called for foreign private companies to invest in the country and develop its rich natural resources. After storming to office in 2006 at the start of the commodities boom, Morales, Bolivia's first Indigenous president, nationalized the nation's oil and gas industry, using the lush profits to reduce poverty, expand infrastructure and improve the lives of the rural poor. After three consecutive presidential terms, as well as a contentious bid for an unprecedented fourth in 2019 that set off popular unrest and led to his ouster, Morales has been barred from this race by Bolivia's constitutional court. His ally-turned-rival, President Luis Arce, withdrew his candidacy for the MAS on account of his plummeting popularity and nominated his senior minister, Eduardo del Castillo. As the party splintered, Andrónico Rodríguez, the 36-year-old president of the senate who hails from the same union of coca farmers as Morales, launched his bid. Ex-president Morales urges supports to deface ballots Rather than back the candidate widely considered his heir, Morales, holed up in his tropical stronghold and evading an arrest warrant on charges related to his relationship with a 15-year-old girl, has urged his supporters to deface their ballots or leave them blank. Voting is mandatory in Bolivia, where some 7.9 million Bolivians are eligible to vote. Doria Medina and Quiroga, familiar faces in Bolivian politics who both served in past neoliberal governments and have run for president three times before, have struggled to stir up interest as voter angst runs high. 'There's enthusiasm for change but no enthusiasm for the candidates,' said Eddy Abasto, 44, a Tupperware vendor in Bolivia's capital of La Paz torn between voting for Doria Medina and Quiroga. 'It's always the same, those in power live happily spending the country's money, and we suffer.' Conservative candidates say austerity needed Doria Medina and Quiroga have warned of the need for a painful fiscal adjustment, including the elimination of Bolivia's generous food and fuel subsidies, to save the nation from insolvency. Some analysts caution this risks sparking social unrest. 'A victory for either right-wing candidate could have grave repercussions for Bolivia's Indigenous and impoverished communities,' said Kathryn Ledebur, director of the Andean Information Network, a Bolivian research group. 'Both candidates could bolster security forces and right-wing para-state groups, paving the way for violent crackdowns on protests expected to erupt over the foreign exploitation of lithium and drastic austerity measures.' All 130 seats in Bolivia's Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Parliament, are up for grabs, along with 36 in the Senate, the upper house. If, as is widely expected, no one receives more than 50% of the vote, or 40% of the vote with a lead of 10 percentage points, the top two candidates will compete in a runoff on Oct. 19 for the first time since Bolivia's 1982 return to democracy.
